The present invention relates to automated workload management systems and in particular to a computerized method and system for globally managing all categories of work by an organization across physically separated multiple locations.
Currently, the focus of an organization, such as a financial institution, for example, a bank, is to treat a request by one of its customers as a one time transactional event. The current customer support model is focused on supporting vertically aligned products and services, for example, credit cards versus bank accounts, along modes of customer contact, for example, ATM""s and branches versus telephones, Internet and mail. More particularly, a single telephone command center located in one geographic area is used to attempt to coordinate all the telephone calls, such as all 800 service calls from all customers around the world. Such phone calls are distributed to service centers at other geographic locations, which is extremely time-consuming.
Furthermore, the customer service representatives or service professionals (SP""s) at the service centers are not always available all of the time. For example, a particular SP may have to attend a meeting or a training session. Moreover, SP""s may have to swap calls, depending on the different type of skill sets required for a customer calling in. For example, a customer might want to know about his or her current balance, or call in to increase his or her credit line or to respond to a bill collection issue or with a billing statement problem. It is necessary for those types of phone calls to be forwarded to different locations and different groups of SP""s. Those types of problems are currently handled by a telephone command center in a single geographic location and all such problems are currently handled by human intervention.
In order to maximize the value of each customer contact to the financial institution and to furnish the financial institution the ability to manage the elements of the interaction with quality, consistency and efficiency, it is imperative for financial institutions to shift the focus to a model that leverages each customer contact. Thus, there is a need for a customer support model which reflects the customer""s total value to the financial institution regardless of the mode of contact. In order to maximize the customer""s value, the financial institution service model must be expanded to include customer sales support as well as efficient customer servicing. The actual access point the customer uses to enter the financial institution system should serve only to help qualify prioritization of the customer""s request.
There is a further need for a computerized method and system of enterprise workload management which affords effective global management of all categories of work across multiple physically separated servicing locations that describes how work is initiated, regardless of service channel, and how work is identified, classified, tracked, managed, and processed, while simultaneously satisfying the financial institution""s objectives, such as leveraging and selling, and achieving the maximum business volume at a minimum unit cost by prioritizing business objectives.
It is a feature and advantage of the present invention to provide an automated method and system for enterprise workload management that enables an organization to route any channel service to any capable service site to support service location independence.
It is a further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that enables an organization to provide services to customers at any time and by any communications channel the customer chooses, wherein the enterprise workload management knows all work in process for a customer so that when a customer is identified, that customer will be routed to the first available agent that can best satisfy both the customer""s intent and the organization""s intent.
It is a still further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which supports unlimited geographical service centers with highly scaleable features to accommodate future growth.
It is another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which replaces manual procedures with automated management tools to maximize the central management control and to minimize the cost of operation.
It is an additional feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which maintains and monitors a service professional skill set and availability data at an enterprise level to support the dynamic resource allocation and workload assignment among geographic service centers.
It is also a feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which provides real time monitoring of service channel traffic, staffing activities, average speed of answer, and handle time categories at the enterprise, site, unit, and individual levels. This monitoring provides real-time event notification when threshold controls specified by the enterprise operations are exceeded, wherein such notification generates alerts that trigger dynamic resource reallocation and workload assignments among geographical service centers.
It is still another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which collects management information and performance measurement with MIS (management information systems) reporting capability to support the continuous improvement process.
It is a further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which supports accurate volume forecasting to avoid unnecessary resource reallocation by reducing forecast unit intervals.
It is a still further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which incorporates human behavior into the management process in matching the right skill to the right service channel, distributing the right amount of requested service to the right SP, switching an SP from one service job to another service job at the right frequency, and furnishing advance notice with time allowance for switching an SP from one service job to another service job.
It is an additional feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which retains historical data enterprise-wide to support planning and improvement processes.
It is still an additional feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which supports a work item inventory mechanism to keep a record of a work item status from initiation to queuing, to active, to completion, and to ending with final storage in an enterprise archival system.
It is a still further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that supports customer contact history as data for personalization of the customer""s future contact in order to assure a quick response and quality service.
It is another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that supports dynamic reprioritization of work with response time as high priority to assure that the system will respond to customer requests in a timely fashion.
It is yet another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that supports a customizable rules engine to manage the definition of business policies for the workload distribution.
It is also a feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system with 24 hours a day and 7 days a week operation.
To achieve the stated and other features, advantages and objects, an embodiment of the present invention utilizes a management software or platform to automate service center coordination between a plurality of sites and to arrange distribution of resources. The resources are SP""s at various customer service centers. The resources are located at a number of sites, for example, at various locations in the United States, and there are a number of service channels, such as inbound and outbound telephone calls, sale of service for an all-bank call, and work items. Work items include, for example, fax, letter mail, internet e-mail and internally generated e-mail. All documents are scanned into electronic images, and the customer service center picks up the images through the system, and works at different locations. Thus, if the work images cannot be done in one service center, another SP in another service center can look into the system and processes such electronic work items.
In an embodiment of the present invention, the entire organization, such as a financial institution, is globalized for all different business units in order to pool, for example, all retail, student loan, mortgage, and credit card activities to enable them to be served by all service centers of the financial institution. A single SP is able to handle all different types of service calls. Computers are used to automate all the interfaces and to manage, coordinate, and reassign all telephone calls, electronic work items, and inbound and outbound calls. Computers are also used to distribute all the work items to all the SP""s. The method and system includes other computer elements besides computerizing the calls. For example, the planning and overall control and the entire method and system is computerized.
In an embodiment of the present invention, from the point of view of the enterprise command center handling the enterprise workload management, planning is 18 months or 6 quarters ahead. It involves determining, for example, what type of service must be provided and how many customers the financial institution will have, what the customer content rate will be, and predicting what types of service will be needed. Planning also includes the different kinds of volume, such as call volume or e-mail volume and forecasting how many of each there will be. For long-range planning, the forecast is used to determine how many FTE""s (full time equivalents), i.e., full-time SP""s, and how many steps are needed to respond to such volume. Based on such planning, the financial institution can estimate in year quarterly forecasting how many FTE""s will be needed on a quarterly basis and forecast the goal, for example, into the schedule or steps for the financial institution.
In an embodiment of the present invention, in the distributing environment, the financial institution""s goal is to consolidate all its numerous service centers into a smaller number, such as 6 or 7 mega centers. The quarterly forecasting is used to determine how many steps will be located in the different mega centers. Quarterly planning involves different SP""s to handle different types of customer service based upon whatever skill levels the SP""s have. When the financial institution is doing the quarterly planning, it also determines the financial cost and includes finance approval, which involves interaction between departments of the financial institution. In addition to quarterly planning, the method and system of the present invention also performs weekly and daily plannings with a computer to support those types of planning. Planning is generally characterized as volume forecasting, scheduling, and staff scheduling, and is further characterized as enterprise site capacity planning.
In an embodiment of the present invention, a group of planning activities is administered in a workforce management process known as administration. Administration is a long-range execution, which means it is based on sub-hourly (e.g., half-hourly) intervals. There is traffic coming in through telephone calls, e-mail, mail image. Administration is needed to monitor on-line and make sure there is a balanced work load among all the sites and among all the groups of the SP""s. It is a long-range environment in which those kinds of half-hourly execution results are produced.
In an embodiment of the present invention, the enterprise workload management system captures data from current execution results and forecasts planning volume. For example, the system captures and inventories data regarding the mailing of the billing statements and analyzes and predicts the volume of expected inbound phone calls, and on what day and at what time. The captured and inventoried information is used by the system to reschedule and plan for the particular day or week. When the system detects such an event, it makes an appropriate forecast. The forecasting can be done on a quarterly basis. If, for example, mailing of the billing statements is delayed by a day because of a problem in the statementing process, the data is entered into the system to effect appropriate scheduling changes. Other types of changes may likewise affect scheduling, and corresponding data is likewise entered into the system. The system then analyzes the data and redistributes all the instructions to all the sites and to all the SP""s, for example to e-mail or to log into the inbound phone call application.
In an embodiment of the present invention, those types of execution results have long-range performance or management data that are collected and put into a database. The database is where the next phase, known as maintenance, is performed. The maintenance methodology maintains those types of data and all kinds of data in a data warehouse. Maintenance is characterized as a kind of analytical tool to pool all those types of data with those types of execution results and those types of forecasting data together to produce an MIS report. These types of information can be analyzed by the enterprise command center, and the enterprise command center personnel may suggest the need to redistribute volume to different locations or reschedule staff. In an embodiment of the present invention, those types of suggestions go, for example, to senior management for the improvement process. The improvement process includes simulations to run those suggestions and produce optimized results. The results are fed back to the planning process. Such feedback goes to the daily planning, which means for the next day follow-up of the execution plan. Those type of improvements also have weekly planning improvements, as well as for quarterly and for the long range. Accordingly, a complete loop is defined of the work force management.
Additional objects, advantages and novel features of the invention will be set forth in part in the description that follows, and in part will become more apparent to those skilled in the art upon examination of the following or upon learning by practice of the invention.